Everyone Spent Thanksgiving Shopping Online, Many on their Phones

Online shopping is getting bigger and bigger, especially on the days the stores are closed

Black Friday has become a huge day for retailers, online or not, but it seems that for Americans, the day before Black Friday, which would be Thanksgiving, is becoming a big shopping day as well.

Traditionally, it was the one day that people spent with their families and away from computers.

The big shops are all closed as well, but online ones never close. And with more and more people relying on phones and tablets to go online and shop, it's no surprise that Thanksgiving saw a big bump in shoppers.

The biggest winners were BestBuy, which saw a 104 percent traffic increase from the day before, Walmart and Sears, which saw a 92 and 90 percent rise.

Overall though, Amazon was the biggest target, with 25 million visitors, up from 21.6 million the day before.

But Walmart was very close behind with 24.6 million, compared to just 12.8 million in the previous day. Note that all of these numbers don't actually include mobile visitors.

IBM has some stats on mobile usage though and they're quite interesting. It says that 28.5 percent of the people visiting an online store did so on mobile devices, ten percentage points more than last year.

The iPhone led the pack, understandably, with 10.5 percent of all traffic, followed by the iPad with 10.1 percent and Android devices, all of them, with 7.7 percent. As for the people actually buying stuff, 15.4 percent of them did it on a mobile device.

The Black Friday numbers show more of the same. But because most stores were closed on Thanksgiving, the day is now becoming bigger for online retailers than Black Friday or even Cyber Monday.

Online shopping is nothing new, though still on the rise, but the big and obvious trend of this year is mobile shopping. In a few years, it's going to become the biggest source.